When Eddy de Clercq brought Larry Heard from Chicago to the Roxy in 1988, there were only fifty people on the dance floor. De Clercq was the first to buy house records, long before anyone else needed that ‘thump music’ or ‘niece music’, as can be read in his biography Never let the night end. His parties later grew into extravagant havens for the creative and intellectual avant-garde of Amsterdam. Erwin Olaf remembered the first disco parties he gave in the Brakke Grond. Confetti was thrown from the balcony, drags danced shoulder to shoulder with models and when Donna Summers ‘I feel love’ was played the whole room exploded, he said. NRC.
Never let the night end is a book in which the magic of the night is realistically depicted. You can almost feel the beats pounding against the paper, your fingers wet with sweat dripping from the ventilation pipes.
That is also the case for What the fuck old man, the biography of Daniel ‘Dano’ Leeflang. In 1989, he covered an evening at the Roxy for a local newspaper, dancing in the crowd for four hours straight. Dano grew into the Herman Brood of dance and stood at the cradle of hardcore (gabber): house with pounding basses, film samples and drums that rise to the heartbeat of a top athlete. Everything went faster and faster, until DJ Dano couldn’t keep up with the pace himself. There was a period when his regular driver and dealer delivered thirty grams of coke a week.
The night is a sanctuary that also has a downside, it appears from Lost and Sound. Berlin, Techno and the Easyjetset. A club like Berghain is a place of pilgrimage for young people trying to figure out life in dark spaces where music is so overwhelming that it unites everyone. But even that is not accompanied by stigmas, we read in the story of a mother who leaves her child in the residential community at night to be able to go out.
Eddy de Clercq and Martijn Haas: Never Let The Night End. Publisher Bas Lubberhuizen/Nieuw Amsterdam. 288 pp., €57.50.
Arne van Terphoven: What the fuck old man. The bizarre life of DJ Dano . Mary Go Wild, 395 pp., €24.95
Tobias Rapp: Lost and Sound. Berlin, Techno and the Easyjetset . Innervisions. 287 pages. Only German version still available.